Paula (18 page)

My parents left for Geneva and Michael and I began our married life in their enormous house, with six months' rent paid by Tío Ramón and the pantry my mother had stocked like a generous magpie: there were enough sacks of grains, jars of preserves, and even bottles of wine to survive Armageddon. Even so, the house was not practical; we did not have enough furniture to fill so many rooms, or money to heat them or to hire indoor and outdoor domestic help. Perhaps worse, no one was on the property after we left every morning for the office and the university. The cow, the pig, the chickens—the very fruit from the trees—were all stolen; then thieves broke the windows and stripped us of wedding gifts and clothes. Finally, they discovered the entrance to the secret cave of the pantry and carried all that away, leaving a thank-you note on the door as the ultimate irony. That was the beginning of a string of robberies that added unwanted spice to our lives. I calculate that more than twenty times thieves have broken into houses we lived in, taking nearly everything, including three automobiles. By a miracle, my grandmother's silver mirror was never touched. Between robbery, exile, divorce, and travel, I have lost so many things that now I begin to say goodbye to something almost as soon as I buy it, because I know what a short time it will be in my hands. When the soap vanished from the bathroom and the bread from the kitchen, we decided to leave that empty, rundown, old house where spiders wove their lace on the ceilings and mice sashayed impudently through the rooms. In the meantime, my grandfather had retired, bidding farewell forever to his sheep, and had moved to the ramshackle old beach house to spend his remaining years far from the din of the capital and await death with his memories, in peace, never suspecting that he had twenty more years in this world. He turned his house in Santiago over to us, and we settled in amid solemn furniture, nineteenth-century paintings, the marble statue of the pensive girl, and the oval table in the dining room that was the stage for Memé's enchanted sugar bowl. We were not there for long, only long enough to build—on audacity and credit—the small house where my children were raised.

One month after I was married, I developed pains in my lower abdomen and from pure ignorance and confusion attributed them to a venereal disease. I did not know exactly what that was, but I supposed that it was related to sex and therefore to matrimony. I did not dare discuss it with Michael because I had learned in my family, and he in his English school, that such intimate topics are in bad taste. I certainly did not dare approach my mother-in-law for counsel, and my own mother was too far away, so I bit my lip and bore it until I was scarcely able to walk. One day as I painfully pushed a shopping cart through the market, I met the mother of my brother's former girlfriend, a suave and discreet woman I knew only slightly. Pancho was still tagging after the new Messiah and his amorous ties with the girl had been temporarily interrupted; years later, he would marry her, divorce her, then marry and divorce her a second time. This extremely pleasant woman asked me politely how I was, and before the words were out of her mouth I had clamped my arms around her neck and babbled that I was dying of syphilis. With admirable composure, she took me to a nearby tea shop, where she ordered coffee and tea cake and then questioned me on the details of my volcanic confession. The minute we finished the last forkful of cake, she escorted me to the office of a physician friend who diagnosed a urinary tract infection, possibly provoked by the icy drafts in my parents' colonial house. He prescribed bed rest and antibiotics and sent me on my way with a waggish smile. “The next time you have an attack of syphilis, don't wait so long, come see me right away,” he said. This rescue was the beginning of an unbroken friendship. We adopted each other because I needed another mother and she had room to spare in her heart; she came to call herself Mama Hilda, and has beautifully fulfilled that role.

My children have determined my life; since the day they were born I have never thought of myself as an individual but as part of an inseparable trio. Once, years ago, I tried to give priority to a lover, but it did not work out and in the end I left him to return to my family. This is something we must talk about later, Paula, but for now I will pass over it. It never occurred to me that motherhood was optional, I thought it was as inevitable as the seasons. I knew I was pregnant before it was confirmed medically; you appeared to me in a dream, just as your brother, Nicolás, did later. I have not lost that gift, and now can predict my daughter-in-law's children. I dreamed my grandson Alejandro before his parents suspected he had been conceived, and I know that the child who will be born in the spring will be a girl, and will be named Andrea, though Nicolás and Celia still don't believe me and are planning to have a sonogram and are making lists of names. In the first dream I ever had of you, you were two years old and your name was Paula. You were a slender child, with dark hair, large black eyes, and a limpid gaze like that of martyrs in the stained-glass windows of some medieval churches. You were wearing a checked coat and hat, something like the classic costume of Sherlock Holmes. In the next months I gained so much weight that one morning when I stooped down to put on my shoes, the watermelon in my belly rolled up to my throat, toppling me head over heels and so definitively displacing my center of gravity that it was never restored: I still stumble my way through the world. Those months you were inside me were a time of perfect happiness; I have never since felt so closely accompanied. We learned to communicate in code. I knew how you would be at different periods in your life: I saw you at seven, fifteen, and twenty, I saw you with your long hair and happy laugh, in your blue jeans and your wedding dress, but I never dreamed you as you are now, breathing through a tube in your throat . . . inert . . . unconscious. More than nine months passed, and as you showed no intention of abandoning the tranquil grotto in which you floated, the doctor decided to take drastic measures and, on October 22, 1963, he opened my abdomen to bring you into the world. Mama Hilda was the only one at my side during that crisis, because Michael was in bed with a case of nerves, my mother was in Switzerland, and I did not want to notify my in-laws until everything was over. You were born with fine hair over all your body, giving you a slight resemblance to a little pink fairy armadillo, but I would not have traded you for the world, and besides, you soon shed that fuzz, leaving a delicate and beautiful baby girl with two glowing pearls in her ears that my mother insisted on giving you to continue a long-standing family tradition. I went back to work right away, but nothing was the same as before; half my time, my attention, and my energy were given to you, and I developed antennas to divine your needs even from a distance. I went to my office with dragging feet and looked for any excuse to escape; I got there late, left early, and pretended to be sick in order to stay home. Watching you grow and discover the world seemed a thousand times more interesting than the United Nations and their ambitious plans to improve the fate of the planet. I couldn't wait for Michael to get his engineering degree and support the family, so I could be with you. In the meantime, Michael's mother and father had moved to a large house a block away from where we were building ours, and were preparing to devote the rest of their lives to spoiling you. They had a naive view of life, because they had never stepped outside the small circle that protected them from ill winds; for them, the future looked rosy, just as it did to us. Nothing bad could happen if we did nothing bad. I wanted to be a model wife and mother, even if I didn't know exactly how. Michael planned to find a good job in his profession, live comfortably, travel a little, and much later inherit his parents' large house, where he would spend his old age surrounded by grandchildren and playing bridge and golf with his lifelong friends.

Tata could not put up with the boredom and solitude of the beach for very long. He had to give up his swims in the ocean because the glacial temperature of the Humboldt current fossilized his bones and his fishing expeditions because the oil refinery had wiped out both fresh and saltwater fish. He was increasingly lame and ailing, but remained faithful to his theory that illness is a natural punishment of humankind and pain is felt less if one ignores it. He kept himself going on the gin and aspirins that replaced his homeopathic pills when they ceased to have any effect. It was not too surprising they would, because when my brothers and I were children and could not resist the temptation of that ancient wood medicine cabinet filled with mysterious vials, we not only ate the homeopathic nostrums by the handful but also switched them around in the bottles. So my grandfather spent months of silence reviewing his memories and concluded that life is a crock and there is not much reason to be afraid of leaving it. “We forget,” he often said, “that no matter what we do, we are on the road to death.” Memé's ghost was lost in the gelid crannies of that house built for summer pleasure, not winter wind and rain. As the last straw, the parrot fell ill of a catarrh and neither the homeopathic pills nor the aspirins dissolved in gin its owner forced into its beak with a dropper did any good. One Monday morning Tata found it stone cold dead at the foot of the perch where it had sat so many years screaming insults. He had it packed in ice and sent to a taxidermist in Santiago, who shortly returned it, stuffed, with new feathers and an intelligent expression it had never worn in life. When my grandfather had made the last repairs on the house, and tired of fighting the ineluctable erosion on the hill and the plagues of ants, roaches, and mice, a year had gone by and solitude had embittered him. As a last desperate measure against boredom, he began to watch soap operas and without realizing it became ensnared in that vice; before long the fates of those cardboard characters became more important to him than those of his own family. He used to follow several at one time, and gradually the story lines blended together and he ended up lost in a labyrinth of vicarious passions. That was when he realized that the moment had come to return to civilization, before old age delivered its last blow and left him half loony. He returned to Santiago just as we were ready to move into our new house, a prefabricated cottage slapped together by a half dozen workmen and crowned by a straw thatch that gave it a touch of Africa. I renewed my old custom of visiting my grandfather in the afternoons after work. I had learned to drive and Michael and I shared a very primitive plastic vehicle with a single door in the front that took steering wheel and controls with it as it opened. I am not a good driver, and dodging through traffic in that mechanical egg was little short of suicidal. My daily visits with Tata provided me with enough material for all the books I have written, possibly for all I will ever write. He was a virtuoso storyteller, gifted with perfidious humor, able to recount the most hair-raising stories while bellowing with laughter. He held back none of the anecdotes accumulated through his many years of living: the principal historical events of the century, the excesses of our family, and the infinite knowledge acquired in his reading. The only forbidden subjects were religion and illness; he considered that God is not a topic for discussion and that anything relating to the body and its functions is private—to him, even looking in the mirror was a ridiculous vanity, and he shaved by memory. He was authoritarian by nature, but not inflexible. When I began to work as a journalist and had finally articulated a language for expressing my frustrations as a woman in that macho culture, my grandfather did not at first want to hear my arguments, which to his ears were pure poppycock, an attack upon the foundations of family and society, but when he became aware of the silence that had settled over our afternoon tea and rolls, he began to question me in an offhand way. One day I surprised him leafing through a book I thought I recognized, and with time he came to accept female liberation as a point of elemental justice; his tolerance, however, did not extend to social changes: politically, just as in religion, he was a conservative, and espoused individualism. One day, he asked me to promise to help him die, because death can be so obscenely clumsy and slow.

“How shall we do it?” I asked, amused, thinking he was joking.

“We will know when the time comes. For now all I want is your promise.”

“But it's against the law, Tata.”

“Don't worry about that, I shall assume all responsibility.”

“Sure, you'll be in your coffin and I'll be marched off to the gallows. Besides, it must be a sin. Are you a Christian or not?”

“How dare you ask me something so personal!”

“It's a lot more personal to ask me to kill you, don't you think?”

“If you don't do it, you who are my eldest grandchild and the only one who can help me, who will? A man has a right to die with dignity!”

I realized he meant what he was saying, and finally I agreed, because he looked so healthy and strong, in spite of his eighty years, that I took it for granted I would never have to live up to my word. Two months later, he developed a cough, the dry cough of a sick dog. Furious, he buckled a saddle cinch around his waist and when he had a coughing fit gave himself a brutal tug to “subdue his lungs,” as he explained it to me. He refused to go to bed, convinced that would be the beginning of the end—“From the bed to the tomb,” he said—and was adamant that he would not see a doctor because Benjamin Viel was in the United States all caught up in contraceptive concerns and any doctor his own age was already dead or too sick to practice; added to that, the young doctors were a bunch of charlatans puffed up with modern theories. He put all his faith in the blind old man who “adjusted” his bones and his boxes of unpredictable homeopathic pills prescribed with more hope than knowledge. Soon my grandfather had a raging fever, and tried to cure it with ice cold showers and large glasses of gin; instead, two nights later, his head was split by a lightning bolt and a roaring earthquake filled his ears. When he could breathe again, he couldn't move: half his body had turned to granite. No one dared call an ambulance because with the half of his mouth still functioning he growled that the first person who moved him out of his house would be disinherited—he was not, however, saved from doctors. Someone called an emergency service and, to the amazement of all, who appeared but a woman wearing a silk dress and a triple strand of pearls about her neck. “I'm sorry,” she apologized, “I was on my way to a party,” and she began removing her kid gloves to examine the patient. My grandfather felt that in addition to being paralyzed he was hallucinating, and fought to stop this woman who with inexplicable familiarity was trying to unbutton his clothing and touch him where no one in her right mind would venture. He defended himself with his last vestiges of strength, moaning desperately, but after a few minutes of tug-of-war, and with a smile of her painted lips, the doctor conquered. Her examination revealed that, besides the stroke, that hardheaded old goat was suffering from pneumonia and had also broken several ribs with his cinch-tugging act. “The prognosis is not good,” she murmured to the family gathered at the foot of the bed, not counting on the patient's overhearing her. “We'll see about that!” Tata replied in a quavering voice, resolved to show this woman what a real man was made of. I was therewith relieved of fulfilling a promise lightly made. I spent the critical days of his illness at his bedside. Lying flat on his back between the white sheets, pale, motionless, with his chiseled bones and ascetic profile, he resembled the sculpted figure of a Celtic king on a marble sarcophagus. Attentive to his every movement, I silently prayed for him to keep fighting and forget his idea of dying. During those long vigils, I often wondered how I would do it in case he asked, and concluded that I would never be capable of hastening his death. In those weeks I came to realize how resistant the body is and how it clings to life, even when crushed by illness and age.